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Jimmer: College Basketball’s New Household Name

With every huge game put up by Brigham Young sharpshooter Jimmer Fredette, the comparisons between the nation’s leading scorer and prolific scorers past continue to pile up. You’ve got Pete Maravich and Adam Morrison. Or, if you prefer, Allen Iverson: The College Years or Stephen Curry or a souped-up Jaycee Carroll. Fredette’s ninth-ranked Cougars played their biggest game of the year Wednesday night against undefeated San Diego State, their Mountain West rival and the nation’s fourth-ranked team. This time, in place of the usual anonymity of Mountain West Conference play, there was a national audience paying attention.

If Fredette felt any nerves, it was impossible to tell. Fredette simply did what he usually does – put up points at a crazy rate. BYU won, 71-58, and Fredette scored 43, boosting his NCAA-best scoring average to 26.7 points per game and marking the third time in four contests that he topped 40 points. “Trite and trendy as it sounds, the Aztecs got Jimmered,” Dick Harmon writes in the Deseret News. “Boy, did they ever get Jimmered.” It means about what you’d think it means – getting served an all-you-can-eat portion of points. The fact that the term exists is a testament to the player dubbed “the best scorer in the world” on Twitter by no less an authority on the subject than NBA scoring leader Kevin Durant.

It’s worth noting that Fredette didn’t do it all on his own on Wednesday, and hasn’t all year. In the Salt Lake Tribune, Kurt Kragthorpe pays tribute to “the Jimmerettes” – Fredette’s supporting cast, and a big part of what is shaping up as BYU’s finest basketball season in years. As Daily Fix family member Ben Cohen pointed out in Wednesday’s Journal, Brigham Young is widely disliked enough around its league to qualify as “the Duke of the West.” But if Wednesday’s Jimmerific showing demonstrated anything beyond the fact that Jimmer Fredette is very good at scoring points in basketball games, it would be that, like Duke, BYU is a college hoops irritant to be reckoned with. Might as well keep the comparisons coming.

* * *

The international dateline makes reporting the goings-on at the Australian Open an experience with mild elements of time travel. But a wild Thursday in Melbourne – which was partly a wild Wednesday in the United States – offered a different sort of future shock than usual. Both the men’s and women’s number ones bowed out of the tournament, with Caroline Wozniacki falling first in a close, tense 3-6, 7-5, 6-3 loss to Li Na. Li became the first Chinese player ever to reach a Grand Slam final, and certainly the one with the most “Roseanne”-style jokes about marriage.

Wozniacki came just one point away from winning her match, but Novak Djokovic’s 7-6, 7-5, 6-4 victory over Roger Federer was not nearly as close, despite the score. Djokovic’s win was “the sort of performance that announces a new era,” the Guardian’s Kevin Mitchell writes. “This, Djokovic’s passage to his fourth grand slam final, might have been Federer beating Pete Sampras at Wimbledon in 2001. We will see.”

* * *

There was nothing new about the past few weeks of the University of Iowa football team’s winter workouts – the Hawkeyes, like most big-time football programs, have had a rigorous offseason workout program for years. What was new and more than a little disturbing was that this week 13 Hawkeyes ended up in the hospital after developing rhabdomyolysis, a stress-induced muscle disorder with some potentially serious side effects, and which in healthy young football player types is usually caused by strenuous exercise.

Which appears to have been what happened at Iowa, where a familiar tradition suddenly resulted in some unfamiliar and scary results. “Nearly every Iowa player of the past decade or more who ascended from two-star recruit to NFL prospect has been quick to credit strength coach Chris Doyle,” the Sioux City Journal’s Don Doxsie writes. “It’s a familiar refrain. They always say that Doyle’s relentlessly maniacal workout regimens push them harder than they ever could have pushed themselves to reach their full potential. It seems as though maybe this time Iowa players were pushed just a little too hard.”

The school was quick to embark on a fact-finding campaign in hopes of finding out what, besides the ailing players, made these workouts different than usual. Iowa sports information director Rick Klatt noted, in an email, that the hospitalized players came from different positions on the field, ranged in age from freshman to senior, and were not all in the same workout group, and that “these workouts have been operated completely within the rules of the NCAA for off-season training and conditioning.” He added that the same regimen has been in use before this winter. (Here’s a transcript of Iowa’s press conference to address this issue Wednesday.)

At CBS Sports, Dennis Dodd writes that the NCAA rules governing offseason workouts, more than anything else, are the issue in this case. “This is The Kill Season,” Dodd writes. “It operates mostly out of mind and certainly out of sight. It has claimed 19 lives since 2000. … And it’s all completely accepted.”

* * *

In a basic sense, Nascar is simple – drive fast enough to finish ahead of everyone else, and you win; do it enough times, and you win Nascar’s lucrative end-of-season prize. Over the course of the long racing season, though, Nascar is anything but simple, thanks to a complicated scoring system that allots 185 points to a race’s winner, 170 to the second-place finisher, and on down the line, with various bonuses awarded for leading laps and other micro-victories. On Wednesday, Nascar announced that it would change and simplify the scoring system – the lap-leader bonuses and such will stay in place, but the first-place finisher will receive 43 points, second place 42, and the last car to finish will receive one lonely point.

The response on the Nascar scene was broadly positive, but there is some concern that the newly simplified system might be a bit too simple. “Under the basic 43-to-1 system, the consequence to teams not finishing races will be harsh,” Lee Spencer writes at Fox Sports. “How does a driver recover when faced with a huge deficit? And when it comes to crunch time before the Chase, will drivers ramp up the action or err on the side of caution?”

* * *

The Timberwolves are suffering through another bleak season, but there’s reason for hope in Minnesota, even after another heartbreaking loss on Wednesday night, in overtime to Oklahoma City thanks to an even-more-ridiculous-than-usual showing by Durant. It was a tough one, but there’s cautious optimism as budding young players Kevin Love and Michael Beasley seem on their way to leading the team somewhere better.

But there’s a problem with Spanish point guard Ricky Rubio, a player who was supposed to be key to an over-the-horizon Timberwolves renaissance. It’s not that Rubio isn’t in Minnesota – Wolves fans figured that he’d spend several more years in Spain when the team made him the fifth overall pick of the 2009 NBA draft. The problem is that Rubio, who is still just 20, is stuck in a long and vexing slump that extends back to last summer’s world championships. In the New York Times, Jonathan Givony examines Rubio’s troubles, and how they’ve complicated what was already a rocky road to the NBA.

Found a good column from the world of sports? Don’t keep it to yourself — write to us at dailyfixlinks@gmail.com and we’ll consider your find for inclusion in the Daily Fix. You can email David at droth11@gmail.com.

Comments (5 of 6)

Nice piece on Jimmer. One thing though, is that TJ is Jimmer's older brother. Many years older as a matter of fact, and a driving force behind Jimmer's success. As a matter of fact, that's a major portion of Jimmer's back story; the older brother who gives it all up for his little brother (or something to that effect).

2:32 pm January 27, 2011

What's going on at Iowa wrote:

Um, 'roids?

1:54 pm January 27, 2011

sean wrote:

Not to quibble, but he's at 27.4ppg. 35.7ppg in conference play. Man is sick.

12:47 pm January 27, 2011

Jace B wrote:

TJ is Jimmer's OLDER brother.

12:38 pm January 27, 2011

Tom N wrote:

Hi,
Thanks for the profiles on Jimmer Fredette. He's a great kid and exciting to watch. There's a great backstory with Jimmer and his brother TJ, that can be found via google.

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